The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

How many financially self-sustaining musicians should there be? Streaming has caused the number to fall, but recorded music before that likely made it fall as well.

Should we stop thinking about music as a job and start thinking about it as a hobbyist art form? Nobody is out there lamenting that you can’t make a living off of landscape painting. It’s a fun form of self expression that people will do regardless of the economics, so maybe the problem was ever thinking you could make a profession out of it?

Everyone should become an engineer. Then we can spend our whole lives working to build stuff. That way, we can prevent anyone from pursuing anything creative, beautiful, or transcendental.

Like, I see where you're going with this but music is one of those things that's actually the whole point of being alive. If all we ever do is do "useful" things ($$$) we lose our chance to actually live our lives.

i think you're reading something into my post that i didnt intend. i hate the "just learn to code"/"only STEM degrees are worthwhile" crowd.

we absolutely should be pursing things that are creative, beautiful, and transcendental. but.. should we expect the pursuit of the creative, beautiful, and transcendental to be a career? we should encourage everybody to do because it is inherently valuable instead of pursuing it because its a job.

The US constitution says congress will pay for useful arts and sciences. It says this before paying for national defense fwiw. If career soldiers and scientists can exist with federal dollars, so should useful artists. Now to define useful art...